Page 61 of Hard Luck (Blackstone House)

“If you don’t feel like cooperating, I’ll have no further use for you. In that case, I’ll shoot you up with enough fentanyl to kill a dinosaur and dump you in a shallow grave, then hope the next asshole to come after me is more talkative.” I crossed my legs at the ankles. “What’s it to be?”

The guy struggled, testing the shackles, but they held. To give Dick Steele his credit, he’d always invested in quality equipment.

“If it would help, I could leave you here for a day or two to think about it?”

Nothing.

“Did you know that, on average, a human can survive three days without water? I’m not sure how that changes if you’re in Vegas and you turn off the AC, but it would be fun to find out, don’t you think?”

He deflated. Sagged forward, head slumped. For a moment, I thought he’d fainted, but it turned out he’d merely realised the seriousness of his predicament.

“Fuck them too. I never signed up for this.”

“Who’s ‘them’?”

“I don’t know, man. I just got hired to do a job.”

“Who hired you?”

“Are you deaf? I said, I don’t know.”

“Then how did they hire you?”

“Through Amber Road. It’s?—”

An online marketplace, the dark web’s equivalent of eBay. Except instead of selling secondhand furniture and cheap Chinese widgets, it specialised in the less legal end of the market. Guns, drugs, people. The guy who ran it was called Ivan the Magnificent—Mag for short—and according to Echo, he was as trustworthy as a man got in that line of business. Payments were made in Bitcoin or Ethereum and held in escrow until both parties confirmed the transaction was complete, so presumably, T-Rex hadn’t even been compensated for his broken nose.

Hmm. Bitcoin again.

“I know what Amber Road is. I thought it just sold stuff?”

Asking simple questions built rapport. Stupid people always tried to prove they were smarter than you.

“There’s a ‘wanted’ category.”

“So you browsed for a ‘threaten a woman in Vegas’ gig and hit ‘accept’?”

“It wasn’t as if I had to kill anyone. Like, I hardly touched you.”

“How about the woman you tried to run down in the parking garage at the Galaxy? She wound up in the hospital.”

“What woman?” T-Rex acted shocked, but I was ninety-five percent sure he was faking. “I never went to no parking garage.”

“The person who hired you has done this at least twice before. You’re telling me the guy in the parking garage just happened to be driving a car the same make, model, and colour as yours?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“So? Not my problem.”

“Oh, you think? From where I’m sitting, it looks to bevery much your problem, because you’re the one we caught. Alive, I mean.”

He turned a shade paler. “Look, lady, all I got hired to do was give you a message and scare you a bit.”

“And so far, you’ve failed on both counts. What was the message?”

A sigh escaped his lips, or maybe it was a hiss of pain? “You’re supposed to tell your boyfriend to pay the money he owes.”

---